Cooper's to-do list for 2004

A year after the Homeland Security Department first opened its doors, chief information officer Steve Cooper still has a daunting list of priorities to manage. Make no mistake: the department is up and running. But officials are looking to build a computing environment in which employees working in the department's two-dozen agencies are able to access the information they need effectively and securely.

Cooper's goals include:

Building an unclassified network

DHS has no shortage of network connections, but it needs an interagency network to carry unclassified data. Officials opted to go with an infrastructure developed through the former Immigration and Naturalization Service's Atlas program.

"Now what we are doing is continuing to do work to bring the unclassified networks together to connect into the backbone so we move from a bunch of networks into one in our unclassified space," Cooper said in an interview with Federal Computer Week. "That work will continue. We're leveraging programs like Atlas